For me, it's ultimately about storytelling. When I do fiction, I try to write with some excitement, charge and energy. I like to have fun and for the reader to pick up on that. The Creep author Michael Lapointe
A noir lead character follows a chilling coverup in author's debut novel
(Before writing The Creep) I started doing some soul-searching about what frightened me, what got under my skin, what were the films that scared me and the real-life stories that frightened me.
Author Michael Lapointe
The Creep Michael Lapointe Random House Canada
Michael Lapointe has written for some of the most prestigious publications in the world.
His elegantly crafted contributions have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement and The Atlantic. And back home in Canada he pops up regularly in The Walrus.
The 34-year-old Lapointe's literary credentials also reflect a striking eclecticism. He seems equally at home writing about the downfall of Truman Capote, the world's largest pearl and the many faces of gambling. So perhaps we shouldn't be that surprised that he has now ventured into the world of horror fiction.
Yet, does his debut novel, The Creep, really fall into the horror category? One advance reader reported it gave her nightmares. But another said it was full of “dark insights into the cracked psyche of this era.”
Meanwhile, now that the book is out, Lapointe is talking about the exhilaration of unfettering his imagination to its extremes.
“It's about stringing together these outlandish scenarios and seeing if I can make them probable,” he says from his home in Toronto.
Yet again, how outlandish, really, are the issues raised in a book that examines the dark side of medical research, journalistic ethics and the fragility of truth? The Creep doesn't really venture into the world of the supernatural but instead proceeds from a solidly naturalistic base, and that no doubt explains why its horrors seem so credible.
It introduces the reader to New York City journalist Whitney Chase, who is smart and ambitious but also a bit of a psychological mess with an unfortunate history of fabricating facts to bring more substance to a story. She calls this compulsion “the creep” and has craftily managed to avoid exposure to the point where she now writes for a respected U.S. news magazine.
Then comes the scoop of her life — a medical miracle of epic significance having to do with the creation of artificial blood. But as she pursues the story behind this discovery she also encounters a coverup relating to a series of hideous deaths across the country. With darkness and duplicity enveloping her and forcing her to make choices, her personal turmoil is further heightened when her ethically challenged past finally catches up with her.
Whitney was in Lapointe's mind from the beginning. “The inception of the idea for the book and her arrival were sort of simultaneous,” he says. He didn't want a two-dimensional heroine — he wanted moral ambiguity. So yes, Whitney has exceptional journalistic qualities.
“Like many writers, I was shocked by the treatment of journalists during the Trump campaign and its aftermath, so I wanted to access that a little bit with Whitney.”
Yet, Whitney is also capable of the kind of “fake news” that the former U.S. president railed against. “I wanted her to be a sort of `noir' character,” Lapointe says. “There's this shadow that falls over her at all times, and she's certainly more interesting as a character to have these self-destructive elements.”
Three years ago, Lapointe experienced a “desire” to experiment in the horror genre.
“I started doing some soul-searching about what frightened me, what got under my skin, what were the films that scared me and the real-life stories that frightened me,” he says. In the end he seemed less driven by things that go bump in the night than by real-life horrors — for example, the scandal of celebrity surgeon Paolo Macchiarini and his experiments with artificial trachea. Or Carl Elliott's book, White Coat Black Hat, with its unflinching examination of ethics in the U.S. health-care system.
The novel is set in the early 2000s. Lapointe didn't want to have to deal with smartphones and their like. He wanted to ensure the existence of “unobserved dark little corners for things to take place.” But he was also driven by memories dating back to his early teens — especially the aftermath of 9/11 and the now generally discredited justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Lapointe talks now about this “naive perspective” of journalism as “a record that discovered, explored and provided a basis for factual discussion” and “the rude awakening ” that people of his generation would later experience. “The facts were readily available, but didn't seem to matter,” he says. “I felt we were entering a dimension in which facts were somewhat irrelevant to policy-making and that it was a harbinger of things to come — so the world in which we live now is even more fractured and truth even more in the eyes of the beholder.”
The result is a novel that carries the kind of baggage one doesn't normally associate with genre fiction.
“It's a heavily plotted book,” Lapointe acknowledges. “But once you get that plot in motion, it really does carry you along. I felt this book that a careening momentum that I was riding, but I also began to feel that the thematic elements were lining up.”
Indeed, he resists categorization of The Creep as a “genre” novel. “When I say I wanted to write in the horror genre, it doesn't mean I want to cohere to a pattern that pre-exists,” he says. “For me, it's ultimately about storytelling. When I do fiction, I try to write with some excitement, charge and energy. I like to have fun and for the reader to pick up on that.”
For Lapointe, the writing life “operates at the intersection of pain and pleasure.” In the case of The Creep, it came at what he remembers as a “fraught” moment in his young career. “I'd written two novels that failed to sell and was very deep in debt at the time.” Tough decisions loomed.
“How many times can you invest so much time and energy in projects that may not amount to anything? So The Creep had an extra intensity to it because I only had a window of six to nine months to write it in the way I needed to before my debts would be completely untenable.”
His gamble with The Creep paid off. Now he'll be happy if people “just want to read it on the level of story and character and twists and turns. But I also hope people will read it as a metaphor for a world that has some relevance to today. But if readers just tell me that they loved the story — well that will still be wonderful to hear.”